11.6.10

TERRE CONTRE CIEL

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Film socialisme is nothing less than an affront, one to the manner in which cinema now likes to present images before it surrounds them with worlds. A common approach to Godard’s work is to suggest that he poses questions, not answers; that his films withhold rather than ‘communicate’. But Film socialisme is the most direct film in recent memory: its editing is a form of crisis historiography (or, that crystalline structure Deleuze once pointed to: sheets of the past colliding with simultaneous peaks of the present), and its approximations of light a catalogue of yesterday’s media. See it, as I was lucky to, on 35mm: film offers an anchor, a liberation, a measure of what is at stake. If we are still talking – perhaps now louder than ever – about the medium's electronic mutation, there’s little need to worry about specifics here: DES CHOSES / COMME ÇA. From this point on, cinema is no longer in a position to recover.